Contests & Promotions

With the extended season winding down and most of the cards waiting to go back onto the shelf for the extended decks, I decided to try a take a deck archetype from the extended environment and apply it to the standard metagame. I played the “Pro Tour Junk” deck at a Chicago qualifier and liked the way it seemed to draw answers to the opponent’s threats and decided to apply the same thought process to standard. Obliviously there are holes in the deck from losing Tithe

smoothes any color issues that may arise, thins the deck so that you can draw more threats, and helps achieve threshold for the mystic enforcer.

Lands:

The palace does come into play tapped, but with 6 other “pain” lands the drawback is better than the alternative. With the regeneration abilities of both the monger and the lynx each color is balanced.

is the one card that could be debated in the deck. It does take out a creature and nets another card in the process. A mongoose could be a better call in this position.

After testing the deck for consistency and to make sure the manna curve supported the cards I took the deck to our local Monday night tourney. The tourney was 5 rounds of Swiss with a cut to top eight.

Round 1: B/W desolation angel deck.

Game one saw a stare down of lynxes on both sides of the table, but when monger and enforcer joined the battle, the tide swung to my favor. Vindicate

topped off the victory. Game two saw no enforcers or mongers. A “kicked desolation angel” followed by life bursts gave him the victory. Game three saw early verdicts and duress shrinking his hand. Enforcers (two) showed up to join the party. He got Desolation Angel

Game one burn came to the dome early and often. Monger joined the party, but not in time to stop the burn from finishing me off. In comes the Aegis from the sideboard. Games two and three saw the Aegis join the game early and protected my dome from the fire. Bounce delayed my attacks, but deed kept his few creatures away and the Aegis won the match.

2-0, 4-2

Round 3: Land Destruction (mono red).

Game one saw duress and verdict strip my opponent’s hand of land destruction spells and vindicate tool out his red sources. A monger hit the board and carried me to victory. Game two, again duress (2) took out two land destruction spells and he stalled at three land. I did not miss a land drop and got an enforcer on the board. He destroyed many lands, but it gave me threshold and the enforcer got out of burn range, thus serving for the victory. Again Aegis protected the dome in game two.

3-0, 6-2

Round 4: G/U/B (Finkle-Monger).

Game one saw a standoff of mongers on each side of the table. Eventually bounce and infiltrators saw my demise. In came the spellbanes, but they drew counters from the opponent. Mental note: always keep regeneration manna open. I made the mistake of tapping out in the second game and got two lynxes deeded away (metal mistakes can haunt you the rest of the night).

3-1, 6-4

Round 5: (R/W/U).

I get paired with a player that needed to win to make top 8, thus no intentional draw today. Game one has multiple Lightning Angel

s and the red volver double kicked serving for the victory (lynx does not do much against the angels). Games two and three, discard ruled the day and the pain lands in my opponents deck become his down fall. Lightning Angel

shows up, but it is too little to do anything but pump up the monger. Game two sees enforcers in mass and a deed take out his army. In this matchup my deck has too many early threats for the B/U player to keep up. Duress